I think most of us for most of our lives have been mostly unaware of politics. By that I do not mean we’ve been ignorant, and obviously it doesn’t apply to people who live and work in that world. We all want lower grocery prices and charges at the gas pump, reasonable health care costs, prescriptions we can afford, and some money left over with which to do something fun, like throw a ball or shop for shoes or see a movie or go water skiing. And we pursue these things without much regard for who’s in power in Washington DC.
I am not suggesting ignorance is bliss. I am suggesting that we’ve elected politicians to run the country, and once the hoopla of an election dies down, we just want them to get on with it while we pursue our lives. The assumption is they’re following the constitution, and the laws derived from it, that they have our best interests at heart (not their own), and that the system, as designed, polices itself through various checks and balances. Even when the candidate we didn’t vote for wins, we’ve had a sortof peace of mind that comes from knowing that unchecked power does not exist in America.
Until now.
Nothing about this administration in Washington DC and the man leading it is normal. Whether we are talking about pressuring private universities to bend to its will, suggesting American citizens might be sent to foreign prisons, erasing minorities from websites to promote a homogenized and wholly inaccurate view of what it means to be an American (white, male, cishet, Christian), banning news organizations from press events because of their own internal editorial decisions, browbeating law firms not to challenge the administration or represent those who might while providing millions in pro bono legal work to it, or talking, apparently seriously, about territorial expansion through the annexation of sovereign foreign lands.
None of the aforementioned are “partisan” issues. It’s not like one party, and segment of America, has traditionally been for those things while the other party and its constituents oppose them. I’d say this administration’s assault on our values and institutions are “unprecedented,” but that is not accurate. It is entirely within precedent and within very recent memory. The precedent was January 6th.
It has been said “the best predictor of future actions is past behavior.” We know because we saw with our own eyes the contempt Donald Trump, as president, has for law and law makers when he fomented an attack on congress. Law, and the attempt to enforce it we call justice, is what makes it possible for us to live relatively “free” lives, unencumbered by worry about a state that is not at our service but rather adversarial. Law is under attack. And therefore, so are our lives.
That is not hyperbole. When a man can be mistakenly deported to a foreign prison, when the administration admits his deportation was an error, when the courts, including the Supreme Court in a unanimous ruling, order that man returned (albeit quibbling over the definition of specific words like ‘effectuate’ vs. ‘facilitate’), and when the administration can, seated in the Oval Office with the head of state of the country to which that man was sent, flip its middle finger at the rule of law and say “no”…
our lives – our way of life – are in danger.
At my high school, a private Catholic boys school, Junior English was not called “English.” Instead, it was called “American Dream.” In addition to grammar, spelling, and punctuation, the literature we studied that year was all written by American authors and dealt with American themes, while Junior History focused on the history of the United States from its founding to the present. The two courses were like a kindof stereophonic experience of America, a crash-course in being American – aware of our past and mindful of our future. The portrait of America those two courses painted is being spat on by the administration in Washington DC today.
I am at a loss for how to respond to this. At first, suffering from politics fatigue from the campaign season, I decided to focus on other things. In fact, I have a friend who has chosen not to watch any news, opting instead for HGTV and DIY “home improvement” programs; I thought he might be on to something, and so I tried my best to ignore current events. But if we are not engaged with what is going on, and enraged by it, we will wake up one morning and the country of Mr. Reilly’s US History class and Mr. Moran’s American Dream class will have vanished.
Disengagement is not the answer. Still, I don’t know what is.